Updated APR 04, 2015 5:04a ET
INDIANAPOLIS
This Final Four has been blessed with an enormous number of story lines that give it the potential to go down as one of the greatest of all time.
Mike Krzyzewski in his John Wooden-tying 12th Final Four, and doing it with his youngest Duke team in more than three decades. Bo Ryan and Wisconsin getting a shot at vengeance for the Badgers’ heartbreaking one-point loss to Kentucky in last year’s Final Four. Tom Izzo and his unexpected Michigan State Spartans, with Travis Trice trying to do his best Shabazz Napier impression and make his team the second seventh seed in as many years to win it all.
But there is one story line that will dominate all of them: Will John Calipari’s Kentucky Wildcats become college basketball’s first 40-0 team?
Here’s what’s at stake for Calipari this weekend: Go 40-0, and achieve basketball immortality.
But go 39-1 — or 38-1 — and this incredible season will go down in history as a failure.
Is that fair? Of course not. Judging an entire season based on a game or two in April is utterly unjust, but it’s also the standard of greatness that Calipari has set in his time in Lexington. Anyway, the NCAA tournament isn’t meant to be a fair proposition. The best team does not always win in this single-elimination scenario. Cal’s group of mostly freshmen and sophomores, the youngest team in this tournament, might feel this enormous amount of pressure and crumble in the face of it. A few late-game mistakes could turn sports immortality into an unfortunate failure.
It’s absolutely unfair. It puts an enormous amount of pressure on Calipari’s shoulders, and on his players’ shoulders too.
But fair doesn’t matter. The next few days will be all or nothing for Calipari.
What would 40-0 mean for him? It would mean validation for the one-and-done philosophy that used to be eschewed but is now considered the primary avenue for success for a blueblood program.
And it would mean much more than that. It would mean the public would be forced to undergo a complete reevaluation of a man who has been cast as a villain — unfairly, I would argue — for decades. The indelible ink on his resume, those vacated Final Fours from UMass and Memphis, would be erased. Instead of Cal the Cheater, he’d become Cal the Perfect. The black hat so many have casually placed on Calipari’s head would be removed, and we’d be forced to cast his image in a more complicated, nuanced way. Because he would have proven not just that he did something nobody thought could be done but that he did it the “right way,” with a team of NBA talents he convinced to value defense first and to sacrifice individual accolades for team acclaim.
Here’s what Calipari told me before this season when I asked him about this team’s shot at 40-0: “This was 10 years ago, and I said my goal before I retire is to coach a team to a 40-0 record. Why do you think I said that? My ego, my pride, maybe. (Or) because they say it can’t be done. And my whole life is about doing stuff that they say can’t be done.”
Calipari is two wins away from his coaching dream, from giving the middle finger to all the naysayers, from achieving the impossible.
But he’s also one loss away from his ultimate nightmare, a scenario in which he would have tantalized Kentucky fans, media and sports historians with the possibility of watching greatness unfold before falling just short.
So, 40-0 would be on his tombstone; 39-1 would be a footnote.
If Kentucky loses on Saturday to Wisconsin, or in the title game Monday, here’s how Calipari will frame it: He will talk about the disappointment, sure, but he will also talk about how this team still achieved something nobody thought it could do. To be the first major-conference team since Indiana in 1976 to enter the NCAA tournament undefeated is a magnificent achievement. And Calipari will be correct to frame it that way. The Wildcats will still go down in history as a great college team. But they will not be The Greatest College Team of All Time.
Make no mistake: This weekend is all about John Calipari, and the shot his young men have at 40-0. No one else in this Final Four has at much at stake as Calipari. If Kentucky loses, plenty of his players will leave for the NBA, and Calipari will reload with another top-ranked recruiting class next year, and he’ll be fine and Kentucky will be fine and life will move on. But there’s something magical going on with his current group.
These Wildcats have been on the ropes a half dozen times this year, yet they’ve always pulled it out. If Kentucky had lost in February, this weekend would be about who is crowned as the next champion, but since it got through March undefeated, this weekend is about Calipari grabbing for everything.
You only get one shot at immortality. And for John Calipari, this is it.
Email Reid Forgrave at reidforgrave@gmail.com, or follow him on Twitter @reidforgrave.
The difference between perfection and one loss will define Calipari - FOXSports.com
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